Thomas De Quincey Biography

English writer Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859) wrote prolifically
and in numerous fields, ranging from fiction to biography to
economics, and often crossing genre boundaries in unclassifiable works
that mixed exposition of others' ideas with autobiography and
personal reflections. He remains best known, however, for a single
work:
Confessions of an English Opium Eater
(1821). That work, too, was difficult to classify—it mixed
autobiographical elements with description and evaluation of the
effects of the addictive, analgesic, and psychoactive drug named in
its title.

De Quincey was considered one of the greatest prose stylists of the
English Romantic era, otherwise best known for poetry, and his
imaginative, convoluted prose style, best exemplified in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater
but also on display in a great variety of other works that were widely
read in 19th-century England and America, exerted a vast influence on
later literary radicals such as American mystery pioneer and
experimentalist Edgar Allan Poe and the French poet Charles Baudelaire.

Shaken by Deaths of Siblings

"Among his earliest memories were dreams," wrote De Quincey
biographer Grevel Lindop—appropriate for a writer who put a
powerful stream of his interior life into everything he penned. De Quincey
was born Thomas Quincey in the English city of Manchester on August 15,
1785. The family later adopted the name De Quincey, hypothesizing that
they were related to an old Anglo-French family named de Quincis that
dated back to the time of the Norman Conquest. De Quincey's father
Thomas was a cloth merchant in Manchester, the cradle of English industry,
and the family lived in a pleasant country home. De Quincey was the fourth
of five children; he was close to his siblings and was deeply affected by
the deaths of his sisters Jane and Elizabeth during his childhood. With
his brother William he created a rich fantasy life centered on the two
imaginary warring kingdoms of Gombroon and Tigrosylvania. De
Quincey's father died in 1793, leaving the family with sufficient
financial resources for the time being.

De Quincey was educated in private schools and quickly showed a gift for
language in general. When he was about eight, he impressed a local
bookseller by translating a book of a Latin-language copy of the Bible
into English at sight, and by the time he was 15 he could speak, read, and
write ancient Greek fluently. One teacher at the Bath Grammar School
remarked to a visitor that De Quincey could have given a better oration in
front of an ancient Athenian mob than he, the teacher, could have done
before an English one.

In 1801 De Quincey began attending the Manchester Grammar School, a prep
school-like institution that could have earned him a valuable Oxford
University scholarship. He learned some important literary lessons while
he was there, reading the early works of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, and other English Romantic poets who would greatly influence
his own writing in the future. At the time, however, De Quincey was bored.
He ran away from the school, defying the wishes of his mother, and
wandered around the Wales region, sleeping outdoorsin order to stretch his
money supply. Finally broke, he went to London to try to borrow money on
the strength of his family's good name.

Things went from bad to worse. Lenders refused his applications for loans,
and he nearly starved to death. He was apparently befriended by a
prostitute named Ann, who at one point revived him after he collapsed on
the street by spending her own meager savings on a bottle of port wine and
bringing it to him. When De Quincey later returned to London to look for
her, she had disappeared, and no record of her other than De
Quincey's recollections has ever surfaced. Readers have
occasionally wondered whether she might have been a product of De
Quincey's imagination, but the details he provides in his
descriptions of her are convincing ones.

Began Taking Opium

Eventually De Quincey worked out his problems with his family, and he
enrolled in Oxford University's Worcester College in 1803. It was
while he was a student there that his opium addiction began. At first he
took the drug in the form of laudanum, a liquid tincture (an alcohol-based
distillate) that he sought out for toothache relief. De Quincey's
career at Oxford was mercurial; he was a brilliant student in English
literature and in the Greek, Latin, and German languages. Embarking on his
final exams in 1808 he started out strongly but left school before
finishing, and he never received his degree.

Instead he plunged more deeply into the literary life. By the time he left
Oxford, he had made the acquaintance of several of the leading writers of
the day, central figures in what would be known as the Romantic movement.
He donated five hundred pounds anonymously to "Kubla Khan"
author and fellow opium user Samuel Taylor Coleridge when Coleridge was in
dire financial straits, and he lived for a time with poet William
Wordsworth and his wife. Moving frequently from place to place, De Quincey
lived in absolute disorder. He accumulated a huge library of books, and
his friends began to treat him as something of a mobile lending library.
Sometimes he would move out of a house or country cottage when it became
too clogged with his papers and unfinished projects—sometimes his
landlords had a strong enough belief in his potential that they carefully
stored his materials. Despite his often chaotic life, De Quincey was known
as a loyal and supportive associate; when his friend John Wilson became a
professor and was placed in the position of having to give lectures on
subjects with which he was unfamiliar, De Quincey cheerfully ghostwrote
the lectures for him.

In 1817 De Quincey married Margaret Simpson, the daughter of a farmer in
the Grasmere district of northern England. They eventually had eight
children. By the time of the marriage, De Quincey had burned through much
of the money he had coming from his family, and his opium usage had
ballooned to a massive 340 grains daily—more than 20 grams.
Periodically he tried to give up the drug, but he succeeded only in
lowering his intake and keeping it at a consistent level.

By the late 1810s, well into his fourth decade of life, De Quincey had
written only a few articles and pamphlets despite the brilliance many
friends recognized in him. But now, faced with the necessity of supporting
his family, he began to contribute prolifically to magazines, submitting
everything from popularizations of the theories of pioneer British
economist David Ricardo, to literary criticism, to translations of German
poetry and drama. His greatest success, however, came when he wrote about
himself, in a dizzying style that combined erudition, flights of prose
complexity, and bald honesty. His first work in this vein was
Confessions of an English Opium Eater
, which appeared in
London Magazine
in 1821 and was soon reprinted in book form. It remained the best known
of all De Quincey's writings.

Described Effects of Drug

The form of
Confessions of an English Opium Eater
was and remains unusual; it is partly memoir and partly an exploration of
the effects of a mind-altering substance. In a lengthy section of
"Preliminary Confessions," De Quincey recounted the story of
his wanderings as a young man, including his encounters with Ann, the
London prostitute. But the bulk of the work is given over to personal
descriptions of "The Pleasures of Opium" and "The
Pains of Opium." At the beginning of the work De Quincey seems to
promise a moralistic antidrug stance, observing that "If
opium-eating be a sensual pleasure, and if I am bound to confess that I
have indulged in it to an excess, not yet recorded of any other man, it is
no less true, that I have struggled against this fascinating enthralment
with a religious zeal, and have at length accomplished what I never yet
heard attributed to any other man—have
untwisted, almost to its final links, the accursed chain which fettered
me."

The rest of the document, however, gives equal weight to both the positive
and negative aspects of opium usage. "[T]hou buildest upon the
bosom of darkness, out of the fantastic imagery of the brain, cities and
temples … beyond the splendour of Babylon and Hekatompylos,"
wrote De Quincey, "and, 'from the anarchy of dreaming
sleep,' callest into sunny light the faces of long-buried beauties,
and the blessed household countenances, cleansed from the
'dishonours of the grave.' Thou only givest these gifts to
man; and thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh just, subtle, and mighty
opium!" He rhapsodized about his heightened perceptions of music
while under the drug's influence.

De Quincey was equally eloquent in describing the depressive states that
came with drug usage. "But for misery and suffering, I might,
indeed, be said to have existed in a dormant state," he recalled.
"I seldom could prevail on myself to write a letter; an answer of a
few words, to any that I received, was the utmost that I could accomplish;
and often that not until the letter had laid weeks, or even months, on my
writing-table. Without the aid of M. [his wife], all records of bills
paid, or to be paid, must have perished; and my whole domestic economy
… must have gone into irretrievable confusion."

Confessions of an English Opium Eater
was a major success and put De Quincey on the literary map. For the next
two decades he was in demand as a contributor to England's leading
periodicals. He made money off of a translation of a German hoax novel
called
Walladmor
that had been promoted as a lost work by Scottish historical fantasy
novelist Sir Walter Scott. De Quincey wrote some fiction of his own: the
novel
Klosterheim
(1832) and short stories such as "The Household Wreck"
(1838) had elements of description and fantasy that anticipated the styles
and themes of avant-garde writers such as Poe and Franz Kafka. He also
penned a widely read series of biographies of writers, with subjects
ranging from Roman emperors to the Romantic poets he personally knew. The
latter group was as unconventional in form as were his drug memoirs; De
Quincey inserted himself into the narratives, producing a unique mix of
biography and autobiography.

De Quincey suffered anew from the deaths of family members in the 1830s.
One son, Julius, died at age four; another, William, suffered from a brain
disorder and died at 18; and De Quincey lost his wife to typhus in 1837.
His opium dosages increased sharply. By this time he had moved to
Edinburgh, Scotland, in whose environs he spent most of the rest of his
life. The aging writer once again was forced to juggle creditors, but
things changed for the better when his oldest daughter, Margaret, took
charge of the household.

They improved further in the 1840s and 1850s when De Quincey's
reputation as one of Britain's greatest writers expanded. He gained
readers in the United States, and his collected works were issued in
Boston (they ran to 22 volumes) by the Ticknor, Reed and Fields publishing
firm. Although it was not required to do so (Britain and the United States
had no reciprocal copyright protection at the time), the firm paid
DeQuincey royalties. He continued to write in his old age, and to assemble
and revise his works for new collected editions. He died in Edinburgh on
December 8, 1859. Many critics in the following decades thought of De
Quincey as a writer of genius who had never quite reached his full
potential, but a new spate of studies and biographies of the author began
appearing in the late 20th century—an age sympathetic to outsider
figures and to experimenters with psychoactive substances.